


Bridge of Change

by yakalskovich



Category: Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992), Hannibal (TV), Hannibal Lecter Series - All Media Types, Les Misérables (2012), Les Misérables - All Media Types, Milliways
Genre: Chess Game, Community: milliways_bar, Gen, Hannibal Lecter's memory palace, genderbent Lady Murasaki, obscure references, one of the pairings is only there if you know how to look but I couldn't resist adding to that tag, young TV-verse Hannibal in 1979
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-13
Updated: 2013-10-13
Packaged: 2017-12-29 06:19:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,361
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1002003
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yakalskovich/pseuds/yakalskovich
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>During a chess game with Vlad Draculea, Hannibal Lecter remembers his very first visit to Paris with his uncle.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Bridge of Change

**Author's Note:**

  * For [fightingthecage](https://archiveofourown.org/users/fightingthecage/gifts), [fenchurcheast](https://archiveofourown.org/users/fenchurcheast/gifts).



> Sorry, this only makes sense if you know the Milliways pan-fandom roleplaying community. For those who do: it's set at some stage between Dracula's Great Threadzilla Of Debauchery, and his exit into canon.
> 
> Dedicated to the dedicatees because of obvious reasons. You still says it's not a plot -- I think it's the most interesting plot I've been in for a while. One thing happening after the other in a narrative manner with interconnections is plot, no matter how spontaneous or unplanned. Thank you for providing it so I can play in it and with it.-
> 
> Also, thanks to Cass for the beta!!

They play chess in silence, one great monster in disguise of a man sitting surprisingly straight on his pouf at the low table, the other slouching on his couch in a miasma of foul, sweet smoke that dulls his mind.

This is not the first time.

Rolled-up shirtsleeves are the mortal man’s only concession to the informality of their pastime; the other is wearing ragged around the edges as he lounges, in white and bright red silks creased with use. With each passing day, the curls in his long dark-brown hair lose precision, there are more of those subtle lines around his mouth and eyes, and minute flecks of grey show in his orderly little beard. By now, his hands are so thin his nails seem to be talons, like those of a mummy; the reddish tinge in his eyes mirrors the maroon of his opponent.

Should the vampire care to look into the mortal’s mind, he will see a room, dark-panelled like most in that great, ever-changing palace of memories, with pictures hung on the wall: photographic portraits of Vlad Draculea himself, day by day, chess game by chess game, almost imperceptibly wearing thinner and thinner.

On the chessboard, a suicidal knight of the mortal’s wooden army takes Draculea’s bishop, to force the rook to move and prevent castling. In the room, the man adds another combination to the transcript of today’s games, tacked up beside today’s portrait; then, he quickly steps from day to day, reading fragments of this game and that, potential moves like cobwebs spanning, briefly, the entire room until they are cleared away and Hannibal Lecter has decided --

Blank.

He looks at Draculea, waiting for his next move, smiles, and then considers the fallen bishop, now held in corpse-like talons, pondered at through the haze. Draculea seems to favour his bishops slightly over his his knights, and this is not the first time his opponent has noticed this, and acted on the perception. The top of that figure, the stylised mitre, is like a spire, compared to the rook’s crenellations: each different, each needed, within the fortifications that protects the precious king.

The bishop. The spire. The space opening up in the evening light…

In Hannibal Lecter’s memory palace, there is no seguing and fuguing and jumble as in the unstructured memories of other people; no, everything has its place, and can be visited consciously through prescribed ways. So, while Draculea considers the chessboard still, Hannibal slips from that room of portraits and games, and strides down a corridor, takes some turns, descends some stairs, and then wanders down a long, long hall of doors. Each door holds a brass plaque; each plaque shimmers and shifts as the destination behind it changes at its master’s will.

 _Paris October 1979, 1st visit to Opéra Bastille w/ Uncle R. & Murasaki_ this one says at the moment, and Hannibal opens the door and steps through it.

> “... goldsmiths and money changers who built their houses on the bridge, like _Ponte Vecchio_ in Florence, Pulteney Bridge in Bath or _Krämerbrücke_ in Erfurt, among many other medieval examples that haven’t survived just as this didn’t,” a man’s cultured voice says, in French, its accent smooth but still slightly East European.
> 
> Hannibal doesn’t turn to look at the speaker; instead he stands at the parapet, young hands on the light grey stone, looking down at the river. The moving water sparkles with the soft orange from the sun which, now in the half-year when the days are shorter, sets early, its glory half-hidden behind the building that towers on the bank to the left, towers with actual towers topped with pointed roofs that remind him, faintly, of the bishops on the chessboard in Uncle Robertas’ study at home -- at what is home now.
> 
> Hannibal looks up at the sky framed by tall, forbidding towers, and down at the river kept rigid in its bed of stone, and breathes in the scent of this city: the woman passing by, unwashed and perfumed; the wet rot from the river, the peculiar exhaust fumes of the 2CV and the _vélosolex_ that form a sizeable part of the city’s motorised population, Uncle Robertas’ cigar and Murasaki’s agressively crisp cologne
> 
> Behind him, Hannibal knows that Notre Dame itself hides from view behind a tall palais of sorts; they’ve passed the cathedral on their way to the opera on the other bank, meandering through the city past those points his uncle insists Hannibal must see in the good hour they have before the opera starts. Robertas Lecter has been talking much of that time, and he’s talking still, now mentioning some piece of classic French literature that has a crucial scene on this very bridge.
> 
> “Are you listening at all, Hannibal?” he interrupts his own lecture about the existential self-doubt and social exclusion of some literary anti-villain Hannibal knows nothing about and couldn’t care less, at this moment, 17 years old and in Paris at last after a lifetime of degradation and worry.
> 
> “Let him be, Robertas,” says another voice behind him, the French much more heavily accented by the near-inability to not have consonants and vowels neatly follow each other as in its native Japanese, a voice surprisingly gruff coming from the small, neat man with the short black hair, a voice formed by the _kiai_ of a kendôka and the short, commanding verb forms used by a man of the former samurai class. Hannibal has learned all of this already, questioning his uncle’s exotic companion with inexhaustible youthful curiosity, and has made his first basic steps with the bamboo blade. Murasaki has declared him to have promise, and has taken measurements and written letters to Japan that go to another address than the one he usually writes to, his mother; Hannibal expects more kendô paraphernalia made to his measure to make an appearance at Christmas.
> 
> Robertas answers Murasaki’s statement with a short, irritated “Pardon?”, and Murasaki chuckles quietly. “He will learn all this at his school”, he says, “but he’ll never see the Seine from Pont au Change for the very first time ever again. Let him savour the freshness of this unique moment.”
> 
> Hannibal turns around to look at them, Robertas Lecter and Murasaki Jingozaemon, standing a metre apart behind and on either side of him. They think he doesn’t question what they are to each other -- they retain a careful distance during the weekends when he’s home from his boarding school, but Hannibal doesn’t need to question. He _knows_. And the fact that they both are there to impart their unique view on the world and raise him up from the little barbarian he used to be gives him a sense of stability he’s never known throughout the fears of his childhood, the half-remembered darkness when the worst came to pass, and the gruelling years in a Soviet school for the children of dissidents that had failed to break his soul. Now he is free, he is in Paris, he is learning to play music and to fight formally and will be seeing an opera tonight, and existential struggles from classic novels are even a subject he can afford to spare a thought for if he wants to, which he doesn’t, because the world has changed magically, the sky is on fire, and Hannibal leans back against the parapet to look at the palais behind which the great cathedral is hiding, and then he smiles broadly at the two men, and says, “Tell me later. Let’s go on!” and pushes off from the parapet and walks towards the terra firma covered in houses and streets and parks and monuments, and Uncle Robertas is talking again, and Murasaki gives a short samurai-like grunt now and then, and all is well.

The door in Hannibal Lecter’s own palais closes again, and he quickly returns to the room with the portraits and chess games, day by day, as Draculea makes his next move.

Whether he has seen any of this memory, Hannibal cannot tell. The vampire has made one of the moves he anticipated, and in response, he moves his own bishop as planned and then waits again.

**Author's Note:**

> Why I would genderbend Lady Murasaki, and who I would cast -- I metaed on tumblr about it, here: http://omgpurplefattie.tumblr.com/post/53428138392/who-to-cast-as-lady-murasaki
> 
> I know that coming down from the fence as to make this my headcanon/Millicanon is an invitation to getting so totally Jossed during the second season, but I just couldn't resist.


End file.
